Recently it was shown that wavelets based JPEG2000 [1] can yield remarkably ‘poor’ results when applied to synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images that are being used in knowledge-aided airborne moving target indicator (AMTI) radar applications [5]. To demonstrate these surprising results a very simple strip-processor minimum mean squared error (MMSE) predictive-transform (PT) source coder was used [2]. The reason for JPEG2000's poor performance, more than 5 dBs worse for the SAR image under test [5], may be traced to the significant difference in correlation between adjacent horizontal and adjacent vertical pixels found in typical SAR images. Fortunately PT source coding offers a very simple solution to this problem. This is the case since its optimum design of prediction and transformation matrices in a flexible pixel geometry processing environment explicitly takes into consideration the vastly different horizontal and vertical pixel correlations. In addition, there are now available fast on-line PT implementation algorithms that are based on even/odd eigenvector decompositions [4] and/or Hadamard structures [6]. However, for standard images such as those given in the JPEG suitcase as well as the Lena image it has been found that PEG2000 performs satisfactorily. This is due to the use of subband coding that produces an exceptionally appealing objective and subjective visual performance when the correlation between adjacent horizontal and adjacent vertical pixels does not vary significantly, as is the case for this type of images. On the other hand, the current predictive transform strategy still needs to be refined to yield results that are significantly superior to those of JPEG2000 when compressing images such as those found in the JPEG suitcase.